Anti-nuclear weapons advocates look to ‘Oppenheimer’ movie to inspire voters
Voters must create political will to address nuclear weapons
“This is a film about terrible risks and a planet likely destined to destroy itself someday,” writes film critic Michael Phillips (“Oppenheimer review,” July 24). “And we see it, and feel it.”
Well, he’s half right and half wrong. The very existence of nuclear weapons creates terrible risks for every one of us and all life on earth. But it is people, not the planet, who are likely to destroy life on earth. There are steps we mere mortals can take to avoid this horrific calamity, but they all require us as voters to speak up and create the political will to take action.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, by the U.S. on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people, most of them civilians. Most of the U.S. nuclear weapons poised in five European ally countries are much more sophisticated and powerful than those of eight decades ago, and the Pentagon is primed to spend $1.7 trillion over the next decade to “upgrade” this doomsday arsenal. We simply must reverse the course of this new arms race.
Sixty-eight nations have signed and ratified the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and 24 more have signed it with ratification now in the pipeline. The U.S. has not signed, and it simply must take a lead role in bringing all nine nuclear nations to the TPNW table — we owe it to humanity.
The Back From The Brink (BFTB) grassroots coalition urges that our government take five simple steps now to minimize the chances of unintentionally unleashing a nuclear exchange:
1. Renounce First Use as a policy (these are ostensibly “defensive” weapons at very best);
2. End the sole authority of the U.S. president, whomever that may be, to order a nuclear attack;
3. Take all nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert;
4. End the plan to spend $1.7 trillion to upgrade our nukes (we can do so much more with that in domestic and diplomacy spending, including reducing our national debt, to create genuine security at home); and
5. Lead multilateral arms control treaty discussions with all nuclear nations, now.
Baltimore and Frederick city councils and Montgomery and Prince George’s county councils are among the dozens of U.S. political bodies to have debated and passed BFTB resolutions. We need Congress to pay attention to us and act accordingly.
House Resolution 77 is pending in Congress. It urges the president to embrace the goals of the TPNW (work toward abolition of all nuclear weapons) and the BFTB. Already, 36 representatives have co-sponsored this common-sensical response to our nuclear existential crisis, including Maryland’s Jamie Raskin and Glenn Ivey, but we need every representative to take this stand. Like poison gas, land mines and cluster bombs, nukes indiscriminately slaughter civilians and have no place in the human military weapons toolbox. H. Res. 77 doesn’t immediately solve everything — or require unilateral disarmament — but it is a fundamental first step, a recognition of the ghastly problem we face and a path forward.
On Aug. 6 of this year, Prevent Nuclear War Maryland will be holding a 7th Congressional District Nuclear War Awareness Town Hall at Homewood Friends Meeting, 3107 N. Charles St., Baltimore, from 6 to 9 p.m. On Aug. 9, we’ll hold a 2nd Congressional District Nuclear War Awareness Town Hall at First and St. Stephen’s United Church of Christ, 6915 York Road in Stoneleigh, also from 6 to 9 p.m. These events will feature simple factual information about nuclear weapons, their costs, their effects, the treaties and alternative uses of the money involved. Our representatives are invited to attend and respond to constituent concerns, and to announce support for House Resolution 77.
We voters need to wake up and generate the political will to find a way out of this deadly jam. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) or write them at the House of Representatives, Washington D.C. 20515, and urge them to co-sponsor H. Res. 77 today. We need to know that they are literally with us, not against us, and they need to know what we need and want them to do!
— Louis Brendan Curran, Baltimore
The writer is a retired Baltimore assistant public defender, co-conveyor of Baltimore Peace Action, and a volunteer with Prevent Nuclear War/Maryland and Veterans For Peace.
Prevention is the only cure for nuclear attack
As we approach the anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what will be the public impact of the new movie “Oppenheimer” about the father of the atomic bomb?
Since the events chronicled in the movie, which is based on
a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “American Prometheus,” little has changed regarding the place nuclear weapons have in our war-fighting plans. Sure, there are 13,000 worldwide nuclear weapons instead of 60,000 at its craziest height, enough to destroy life as we know it many times over. But that’s no reason to celebrate. The Doomsday Clock of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, around since 1947, put us closer to doomsday this year than ever before due to dangerous technologies of our own making. The war in Ukraine has caused relations between Russia and the U.S. to be at a new low with Putin threatening to use tactical (not necessarily small) nuclear weapons.
Though never publicly acknowledging regret for the 200,000 lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the bombs he was instrumental in creating, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer foresaw a time when “mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima …. People of the world must unite or they will perish.” With other scientists, he opposed the rush to develop the hydrogen bomb, believing there was no way for a nation to defend against it, and argued atomic bombs should be under international control. He carried this message to the highest authorities, including the secretary of defense, and tried ineffectively to influence President Harry S. Truman.
He was not a whistleblower. He believed his insider status and fame would allow him to affect policy. In devastating hearings, he was brought crashing down and was emotionally crushed because of his ties to friends in the Communist Party (this was the McCarthy era). In addition to making enemies of some who subsequently became powerful, it is possible his real crime was opposition to Cold War policies that American leadership wanted to pursue. The last scene in the movie is a flashback to 1947. Oppenheimer and Einstein are having a conversation. They are discussing their earlier fears that the Manhattan Project could start a never-ending chain reaction that might destroy the world. Oppenheimer ends with these words “I believe we did.”
In November 1983, “The Day After,” the most viewed ever made-for-TV movie, followed several families in Kansas and Missouri before the day of and after nuclear war suddenly and unexpectedly breaks out between the Soviet Union and the U.S. over events in West Berlin. One hundred million people watched in horror a dramatized depiction of what nuclear war would do to the lives of ordinary people, and the stories were terrifying. The producers of the movie acknowledged that they were influenced by the Nuclear Freeze movement that had been responsible for the largest-ever U.S. peace rally on June 12, 1982, in New York City. For many, seeing “The Day After” brought Americans face to face with the total devastation a nuclear war would bring to their lives. They mailed letters and furiously made calls to the presidential switchboard. Whether public concern or his own reaction was responsible, President Ronald Reagan changed his tone in a speech January 1984, from threatening the Soviet Union to interest in nuclear disarmament. In 1987, Reagan and Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev successfully negotiated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which may have prevented nuclear war in the ‘80s.
Was the Reagan administration influenced by the New York City rally and the movie “The Day After”? We will never know for sure, but if people are moved after seeing the “Oppenheimer” movie, they should let their elected officials know. The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Once the bombs go off, it is too late. Prevention is the only cure.